SOTS 2nd Hour: Navigating Crypto, 2026 Commodity Picks, & The AI Arms Race (Apple, Amazon, & OpenAI news) 12/2/25

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Sara Eisen (0:43)

Good Tuesday morning. Welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm Sara Eisen with Carl Quintanilla and David, and like Santoli, sorry, David Faber is off today. Subbing for David. We're live at 9 of the New York Stock Exchange. Apple's AI chief is out. OpenAI declares a code red and Amazon is set to unveil its latest efforts around artificial intelligence. We'll talk about the fast changing AI horse race among the mega caps. Plus, more volatility for crypto today. Following Bitcoin's worst day since March, Tom Farley, CEO of Crypto Exchange Bullish, will be with us to talk about whether bottom is in. Gold has a record-setting run this year, but TD Securities says two other metals will outperform in 2026 We'll get those picks straight ahead. But guys, you know I'm on Consumer Watch here, coming off the holiday shopping weekend, Cyber Monday and all of that. We did get an update from Walmart, which I thought was pretty newsworthy and very positive, certainly for Walmart and overall consumers. In part, Walmart says they saw consistently strong sales growth. This is over the weekend from Thanksgiving until yesterday, led by digital customers flocking to electronics, toys, fashion and home categories, as well as unique marketplace finds and holiday essentials. Some numbers, Walmart delivered 57% more orders overall and 44% more orders in under three hours this Black Friday versus last year. So we just had Walmart earnings. We know that they're in a strong place right now when it comes to share gains, especially from the higher income consumer. So clearly they're having a good holiday season. Cygnet Jewelers this morning with a report, the CEO emailing to me, importantly he said, there have been external disruptions impacting consumers, particularly in lower and middle income households. We have taken action accordingly to ensure we meet consumer expectations for value this holiday. So there's the K-shaped recovery that so many companies are seeing. And if you're trying to keep track of what companies are saying this earnings period about the consumer, which they really do have the best real time indication of what the consumer is doing. Goldman Sachs has a great chart looking at sentiment from earnings calls and comments from earnings calls on the consumer. So they made up this basically chart, you know, with an index for it. And what you can see is, sure, consumer sentiment is a little bit down on earnings calls. In other words, how they talk about the consumer, a little bit weakness. But it does remain within the historical average. And I think that explains why the numbers are overall coming in pretty strong. Yes, we can talk about stress on the low income, but overall, resilience is the name of the game. And we do see growth. I mean, whether you're looking at the Salesforce numbers, the Adobe numbers, the MasterCard Institute numbers, I mean, continue to point to growth this year from last year and overall consumer spending.

Michael Santoli (3:30)

I mean, I think muddled through or mixed is good enough for the markets. And I'll look at it through the prism of if there was genuine aggregate trouble, in terms of consumer behavior and finances, you wouldn't see Capital One and Ally Financial Stocks holding up pretty well. You wouldn't see the regional banks doing what they're doing. And the good thing for the overall stock market is you've got to go 50 stocks deep into the weightings of the S&P 500 to really find a consumer-sensitive discretionary name. If you're excluding Walmart, you got to get down to McDonald's. And that's not even that discretionary. My point is you don't have a tremendous amount of leverage to every wiggle in consumer sentiment if you can have faith that we're not going to go into an outright downturn, if next year, as everybody is building in their case, that you're going to get a few tailwinds when it comes to tax policy and New Year enthusiasm. So I think that's allowing the market to sort of set aside some of the consumer stress concerns and get through this period when we don't have real-time data for official government releases. And therefore, you can kind of give a little bit of a pass to things.